Mining the Genre Asteroid: Kingsley Amis’ THE ALTERATION
Maybe you want a dystopia of a different sort, a dystopia that gets less play, less attention, a world less visited. A world less seen but no less dark than the usual dystopic alternate histories.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Another ambiguous Utopia: Stanislaw Lem’s Return from the Stars
So you see, Return from the Stars is a most ambiguous Utopia, indeed, and anyone who reads The Dispossessed (and if you haven’t yet, you should go fix that, too) should also read Return from the Stars and ponder its questions.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: War for the Oaks by Emma Bull
Eddi McCandry is the guitarist for a band that has just broken up. Her career in rock’n’roll is going nowhere; she’s broken up with her boyfriend; and she is more than a little adrift. Luckily for Eddi, a twist of fate makes her the one selected as the talisman for the conflict between two warring […]
Mining the Genre Asteroid: The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
A mysterious source of energy from another universe and the emergence of particles that should not exist according to principles of modern physics and chemistry. And thus, when they decay, they release free, clean energy. Who cares about the motives of the para-men in the parallel universe who are sending the atoms of impossible Plutonium […]
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
“Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come” A portion of that line from Revelations is a code phrase that Colonel Mark Bragg, U.S. Air Force has with his little brother Randolph (Randy Bragg). The scene is 1950’s Florida, the small river town of Fort Repose. […]
MINING THE GENRE ASTEROID: Way Station by Clifford Simak
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Way Station and the works of Clifford Simak Enoch Wallace has a secret. Okay, he actually has two. Almost a century after the Civil War, this veteran of that divisive conflict has been quietly living in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin. He has some strange neighbors (including a family whose […]
